Activist versus nuclear advocate

To offer some analogies, It's like someone would say:

"The fact that there are research and institutions that support 100% plant-based diets doesn't mean we don't need meat in the table"

or

"The fact that there are low carbon technologies doesn't mean that we shouldn't emit CO2 in the atmosphere"

or

"The fact Joe is using PC 12 hours a day for years doesn't mean he can have problems of technology addiction".

All these example hope can explain the feeling I have reading his argouments.

He is improperly using the jumping to conclusion fallacy attack framework to shut down the conversation. 

"N is probably biased in favor of nuclear energy due to being a nuclear engineer"

You carried an interesting topic which I actually studied a little little bit. 

According to these studies ( skepticalscience.com/grap. . . )the level of undearstanding of certain topics depends on the level of scientific consensus. Scientific consensus can change widely depending on how you look at it. 

For example, if you pick different level of expertise in the topic of climate science and particularly the human responsability on the actual climate change you can say that scientists are split in half (so not agreeing on the causes of climate change) but they are groups like economic geologists or meteorologists and they don't actually public peer-review scientific literature on the topic of climate change at all or not frequently. 

If you pick the ones that regurarly publish peer-review scientific papers on global warming the consensus appear relevant (up to 97-99% of scientists agree on human caused climate change).

So it comes my point: Are climate scientists "biased" because they are climate scientists and therefore somehow have a conflict of interests? That's an interesting question but I actually don't have a scientifically based answer to that, but to be honest I don't think so. 

Therefore nuclear engineers are not biased in the same way talking about nuclear power because it's their field of expertise.

However, it's good to note that nuclear engineers should not be considered experts in 100% RE scenarios and therefore only who publish on the topic should count (Mostly Breyer, Teske, Lund, and others).

"he's trying to say that the research you're referring to doesn't account for issues that present themselves when you're working on a full scale power grid."

Yeah, he's trying to dismiss the whole body of evidence I presented, but doesn't prove what he says, it's like I should trust him on the word. 

It's important to point out that being biased doesn't mean you're wrong or illogical. Just that you tend to favor evidence that supports a certain viewing more than evidence against it. Being an engineer myself, I know that engineers are usually very analytical, and less inclined to make decisions based on bias, but we're not above it. Particularly when an individual is making the decision by themselves, or surrounded by other people with the same bias. If your job security depends on nuclear power plants existing, you're going to want to justify their existence.

As for his comment: It was pretty low effort, and didn't really provide any evidence to refute what you said, but that in and of itself isn't a fallacy. More of an unsupported claim.

Are unsupported claims logical fallacies? I guess not. In the site I also found wishful thinking fallacy that could be applied to his reasoning if only would elaborate a bit more. 

Unsupported claims lie outside the realm of logic, so they are not fallacies.

As for wishful thinking, if N's argument took the form "I wish that X were true, therefore X is true", it would fit.

[To TrappedPrior (RotE)]

Exactly, I heared similar reasoning in different episodes so I guess the underling fallacy would be that. 

What do you think, if you want to answer, of my analogies in the comment straight up? Are they sound?

I'm a little thick; which analogies are you referring to?

I commented my own question, it could be that I answered myself since Bo is not answering. Look below the question itself

Found it.

Original argument:

N: "to say that a 100% renewable system is "theoretically" feasible (as reported in the literature) does not mean that nuclear power is not needed."

Analogy:

"The fact that there are research and institutions that support 100% plant-based diets doesn't mean we don't need meat in the table"

Comment:

Well, N does have a point there. Something being "theoretically" feasible does not mean it would work in practice, or work effectively. It just means we can explain the mechanism by which it would work, assuming those explanations are convincing.

The same with the first analogy. Some literature may support all-plant diets, but what about the rest of the literature? How convincing is the pro-plant literature?

As for the others:

"The fact that there are low carbon technologies doesn't mean that we shouldn't emit CO2 in the atmosphere"

This is reasonable. Low carbon technologies may not be able to fully replace higher-carbon technologies. In addition, 'low carbon' still implies that tech emits carbon dioxide ;)

"The fact Joe is using PC 12 hours a day for years doesn't mean he can have problems of technology addiction".

This is context-dependent. Joe might use a PC as part of his job. However, if this weren't the case, and there weren't some other reason explaining his high PC usage, it would be slothful induction to dismiss the pattern of behaviour as a mere coincidence.

To be clear - all of these are somewhat ambiguous, because it's not completely clear where N is trying to argue for. They are right to question 'low-carbon' tech, but if they were, say, trying to argue against using it at all, their statement wouldn't support that conclusion.

[To TrappedPrior (RotE)]

Hi, thanks for the precise answer. 

The point is that they (nuclear advocates) claim that we need nuclear power, and while the original argument might be sound because "theotically feasible" doesn't mean would work on real life it doesn't prove the opposite, that without nuclear power the energy sistem could not be decarbonized which actually is their point made in the video and many other times in divulgation material. 

And as I stated this goes against hundreds of scientific paper on the topic. 

Maybe my analogies were not really correct I propose some new again:

"The fact that scientists think Earth rotates around the Sun doesn't mean that gravity exists"

"The fact that scientists measure higher concentrations of CO2 every year in the atmosphere doesn't mean that CO2 is rising"

These analogies may offer the feeling I have about that is pure denial of the evidence. 

Again his argument could be seen as a jumping to conclusion attack framework used improperly and to mislead

If N is simply dismissing evidence that contradicts their beliefs, without giving a convincing reason why this evidence is flawed, then it is denialism, you're correct. At that point it begins to resemble slothful induction.